


Final Frontier

by CanuckofSpiral



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Megalophobia, The Eye, astrophobia, the vast
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-12
Updated: 2021-02-12
Packaged: 2021-03-12 10:00:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29383128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CanuckofSpiral/pseuds/CanuckofSpiral
Summary: Statement of Syd Langtry regarding an astronomy lecture given at Edinburgh University. Statement given October 25th, 2010
Comments: 8
Kudos: 13





	Final Frontier

There are 10^ 80  Particles in the observable universe. Do you know how many that is? I do now. It's real hard to put that into a context, so here it is in full.

**100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.**

Not helpful, is it? I know. I'm sorry. My hands are shaking too much to make the zeroes as clear as I'd like to make them. But they’re clear to me. I can’t make them go away. I will never again be able to look at this horrible, horrible universe without knowing that number. 

And that’s just what we can observe, for the universe is so much greater, so great that the light from those stars may never, ever reach us.

And damn the stars above for being so far. Damn the universe for being too big for us. We shan’t make our mark, we shan’t do anything at all. We will be forever unnoticed, and to Know that is something that I wish on no one. 

Edinburgh is a fine place to study Engineering. Since I was a child, I’ve wanted to bring the stars to us. I looked into the shimmering void, and promised myself every night that I would construct the engine to bridge the gaps between, and fulfil our destiny as a species. I worked hard for it, too. I was never natural to mathematics, the numbers would get away from me so often, too often. But I laboured. Night after night after night after night, learning how metal and electricity and propellant can bring a man from the Earth to the distant Moon in a few infinitesimal days.

That wasn’t so long ago. Looking at it beside the age of this building, this city, this planet… Well, I might as well still be that child, dreaming beyond what I should have.

I was going to graduate this year, you know. Top honours. My professors said they were impressed with my drive, and I wanted nothing more than to make them proud. Even if I couldn’t reach my dream, I wanted to be a part of the machine that brought humanity to the next level, where we would stand proud, humble and mighty across the stars. To be a footnote in that book would be enough.    
  
It was a few weeks ago. I don’t remember the day. Days do not exist. I had received an e-mail that morning from my professor that a guest speaker would be giving a lecture that day. A previous student, she said. Graduated top honours, currently works for some private astrophysics program, and had even been involved in the Daedalus project.    
  
That had me interested. The Daedalus wasn’t the most revolutionary piece of machinery hurtling around the world, beyond a few experiments that were never made public it didn’t get much press. But to speak with someone personally involved? This could be my big chance.

So I sat at my desk that same morning, and before long a man I did not recognize entered the room. He was a bit below average height, maybe five feet tall. Built like a man who ate too much pasta but made up for it with lots of running. Curly reddish-brown hair with some grey at the temples, long enough to make me think he did not visit the barber often, but a beard short enough that I didn’t think him dismissive of his own appearance. 

You know, even now, I can’t say what colour his eyes were, but his pupils were so large that I would’ve thought he was on some kind of drug, were he not so crisp and coherent.

The first thing he said to us was that space was big. Seems kind of obvious, really, but it was in the way he said it that caught my attention.   
  
“Have you ever thought about the scale of the universe, class?” he began. He definitely grew up in Scotland, from his accent.    
  
“When you look up at the sky, be it day or night, don’t think about it as ‘up’. Think of it as Away. Up has no meaning once you step off this sphere, nor does Down. It’s just Away.”    
  
And as he spoke, the lights in the lecture hall began to dim, and all at once I understood what he meant. The blue sky above was not a comforting ceiling, it was a mirage masking the void that yawns beyond. The stars twinkle though we do not see them and they do not care if we are watching.   
  
As he spoke and as I listened, he stared at all of us in turn, and I could have sworn to you that his eyes, even from halfway down the lecture hall, were staring directly at me. And his eyes.   
  
His  _ Eyes. _

They were now shadows darker than the back of the moon, ringed in light that threatened to burn through me and leave me with   
  
With

I felt it. He was speaking, but I was not listening. I felt like I was falling into his eyes, into an endless infinity that would swallow everything, everywhere, and not notice it happening.   
  
And then I was back, and the lecture was over. I honestly cannot explain what it was about, if it wasn’t clear.   
  
The lecturer, whose name I had at some point heard was Albert Fairchild, was staring at me. I looked around the room, and my classmates lay with their heads on their desks, their eyes wide with… Awe? Terror? A bit of both? But I was still sitting up.    
  
He smiled, a bright, gleeful smile, as if I had answered a question in the best possible way.

You have to understand. Please understand. I did not want to go with him. I did not want this. Or maybe I did, and this is what my dreams are getting me. But I followed him, the whole way he spoke of the tremendous gravity of black holes, bending the fabric of reality until it shredded at the seams. Of the structures of the universe we cannot see, gazing up from our little backwater. He talked of the structure of galaxies, held together by dark matter and the gravity of all things.   
  
And as we stepped upon the roof of the university, the morning light having become the dead of night, he spoke of more. Of the structure of galactic clusters, strings of galaxies hundreds of billions of light years across, so great that were we to see it from a proper distance, a laughable concept in itself he said, we would see the farthest reaches as they were billions of billions of years before the nearest, for not even light can travel fast enough to mean anything before the vastness.   
  
And it went on like that. And on. And on. He spoke of how small atoms are, and if you were to blow up a nucleus to the size of a marble, its electrons would be a full american football field away. 

And then he got a funny look on his face, as though he had found a path he once liked but had not travelled in a long time. And then he slowly, slowly smiled at me with those eclipse eyes. And he leaned down to me, and for the first time I realized I had been crying and staring at the stars. So many stars. Too many to count, laughable. And he spoke to me one more thing, as if summarizing everything he could ever speak to me.   
  
“Every particle that you are was a million, billion things before they were you. And soon, they will be a million, billion more things that will never be you again. You are not different.”   
  
And that did it, I think. The next thing I remember is the stars. I stared into them, and for once, they stared back. They judged me unworthy to reach them. I was too small. I was always too small. All of us were. The stars would not weep for our world, should we disappear into the night. They would not even notice. The gaps between galaxies cannot welcome us, for we are less than bacteria trying to be people.

Gone in an instant, relatively speaking. We are a microscopic speck on a microscopic speck on a microscopic speck and we cannot stand up under that.    
  
And so I am here. I do not know where Albert is. Close by, but everything is on this planet. Everything here is far too near. I don’t know what I’m going to do now. I’ve told my story. My words are no more permanent than this world is.    
  
I think I’m going to go now. I have stars to count.


End file.
